A good movie

I already saw this movie but, since it was ages ago, I thought I might as well check it out again. Well, to be honest, I have to admit that I was actually rather confused by this movie and it took me a while to finally get it (if I did get it at all). The first time around, I had no idea what this movie was about and I thought it was interesting that Buñuel, the most famous surrealist director, would start his career with such a hyper-realistic documentary. The stuff displayed in this documentary was actually pretty extreme and, somehow, I hoped it might be some kind of dark mockumentary but it was apparently the real deal. However, when I start reading about this movie afterwards, I was so surprised to find out that it was after all a surrealist documentary and not something hyper-realistic like I thought it was. Eventually, after rewatching the damned thing, I think I understood (at least, I hope so) what Buñuel was trying to do here. What was displayed was actually still fairly realistic, it was pretty much how the Hurdes was in the 30’s, the surreal aspect was mostly that it was a Spanish director making such a ghastly shocking documentary about a region in Spain. Indeed, such movies were always about some far-out exotic country (‘Les maîtres fous’ which was made 20 years later was a perfect example) and it was completely unheard of to do it about a seemingly modern country, especially his own homeland (Unsurprisingly, this movie was banned in Spain for a while). This style of documentary called ‘Ethnofiction’ blurred the lines between realism and fiction and, basically, Buñuel wanted to parody the genre, in the process, reducing his home country to some medieval backward land which was, I guess, pretty surreal. Anyway, even though it turned out to be much more complex that I thought, it was still a decent watch though.